Friday, 19 June 2009

Lately, the team has been pushing out features and fixes as they're ready in "mini-pushes" rather than waiting for the big, numbered releases that occur once a month. Here's what has gone out in the last few weeks:

* The Wonder of "Wonder Wheel": Next time you search for a video on YouTube you may notice a link on the right-hand side of the page labelled "Wonder Wheel." This is a new beta search option from Google.com, which we think has great potential as a way to navigate the vast range of videos on YouTube. You may have seen "also try" suggestions at the top of search results. Now we are enabling you to navigate across those suggestions graphically. Wonder Wheel displays searches related to the one you are searching like spokes on a wheel, allowing you to explore different search suggestions quickly. You can click on any of the wheel's spokes to see a new wheel with more related topics and browse new relevant video results to the right. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

* Improved Advanced Search: Let's say you want to narrow down your search for a video and be more precise about what you're looking for. Advanced Search allows you to specify many more details than our normal search, including when a video was uploaded, the location it came from, and its length. We've reworked Advanced Search to be easier to use and to better reflect the range of content on YouTube (lots of new stuff!).

* Remaining Time Display on Upload Progress Bar: In April, we launched the new progress bar with our Flash uploader. We added a small enhancement to the UI to show the estimated remaining time based on your file size and internet bandwidth. We hope this will give you a bit more info about the status of your upload.

* Download MP4 Files of Your Own Videos: Oh no! Your computer just crashed and you lost the original files of videos uploaded to YouTube. Don't panic. Find the video you want in "My Videos" and hit the "Download MP4" button to save the MP4 file of the video to your computer. You can download videos recorded with your webcam, too.

* A More TV-Like Experience: We recently launched a feature that hides the player control bar when you are in full screen for a more immersive, TV-like experience. (Speaking of which, read our blog post about YouTube XL for more about optimising YouTube on large screens.) You can also "pop out" any video by clicking on the button in the top right corner, right above the video. The video will open in a new window, without any of the surrounding features or videos, for the simplest possible experience. (Please note: this feature won't work when embedding has been disabled by the uploader.)

* Mobile App in Six New Languages: A few months ago, we launched an all-new YouTube Mobile Application for fast, high-quality video streaming on Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 phones. Just two days ago, we released the App in French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch. To install it in your language, please visit m.youtube.com/app.